Ironically, in my current job, I was hired as a PHP developer, but I'm spending most of my time lately writing C.

Been having a blast too.

You seem to be fixed on #6. The problem is that you don't understand #1.

#1 doesn't require that there be no competition, only that you have enough influence to control the market. MS has shown in many ways that they had or have that level of control, though I will admit it is eroding.

At the time that MS had a near 100% lock on the browser market, it was obtained because of their near lock on the OS market. That is monopoly power. At the time that MS bullied the PC makers into purchasing a license for every PC they made, regardless of what it shipped with, that was *absolutely* monopoly power.

And currently, MS still holds monopoly power over the non-apple hardware desktop OS market. You really can't convince anyone that there is a statistically significant number of non-windows desktop OS installs on PC hardware.

There's also some argument that they have monopoly in the office software market now. They hold the lion's share of the market, and those small few that do compete live and die by their ability to read/write MS format files.

As for the server side, MS never really had monopoly there, and probably never will.

See, this is why I'm seriously thinking of taking up smoking. I constantly worry that when I tell someone that I don't smoke, they'll immediately think I'm a sanctimonious asshole.

As for flying, haven't done it since shortly after 9/11. When I did it then, it really wasn't too bad, just a few soldiers with M-16s stationed here and there. But it's gotten progressively worse every year since. Then add to that the fact that the airlines have been making flying progressively less comfortable. Truly, I can think of very few things I'd like to do LESS than fly commercial air in the US. Given the choice between flying and having radiation therapy again, I'd really have to think about it a while.

Not just demos. A piece of industrial software I worked on in the 90's was usually paid for in monthly installments. Every month when you paid your bill, you got a new key. Don't pay your bill? It would go into a cripple mode. Once the final payment was made, you were given a key that would work indefinitely.